I have some general advice, although it’s hard to be specific with the details you give. 1) Don’t lie / make a new account - poor ethics, poor signaling about

I have some general advice, although it’s hard to be specific with the details you give. 1) Don’t lie / make a new account - poor ethics, poor signaling about ethics, poor signaling about thinking about being rejected from YC. 2) YC today is not what it was ten years ago; different people, different place in the market, different cohort makeup. It’s still a thing that will boost your social capital in the west coast startup world, but I think from reading your post that you’re probably a little stuck on the white whale of your early 20s - might be worth looking at recent batch companies with a hard eye to see if they still fit your dreams for yourself. In particular, I would note a tendency over the last ten years for more and more of a batch to be companies that service other YC batch companies. This is a sensible strategy during a glut of VC in a startup boom market - you have high trust early sales, and your company gets to scale along with the peak scale of the rest of your batch - however, in choppy waters, this high volatility strategy may not work as well, or at least needs some consideration. 3) If you have a team, talk proudly about them, bring them along for interviews, etc. 4) Don’t spend too much time on this - go get some sales. If you have a great team, some sales, and have bootstrapped, you’re golden - perhaps more likely to get in to a batch, but definitely more likely to win and build something valuable. Finally, I’ve solo foundered nearly 30 companies, and cofounded a number (5-ish?) in my life - YC’s preference for non-solo-founded companies is a reasonable preference - but it’s informed, at least in part by the milieu - early stage startup with (originally) grad-student age founders. As you know, starting a company is super hard. It’s super lonely, and you want to get off the ride, all the time. Building those co-founder social and ethics skills are a good thing to do, but they’re not the be-all and end-all of business - your best partners for your new company might not prefer equity to cash, or you may just have a lone wolf type temperament where cofounders are going to piss you off and be distracting. Like so much in startups, it’s up to you to decide what parts of the preferences of others (in this case VC) are because they have real wisdom about your situation and what parts are, while generally helpful, not the best thing for your company / your leadership. Good luck!